RIM Might Be As Confused As the Rest of Us over its Game Plan

When RIM’s Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis spoke at last night’s D: Dive Into Mobile conference he probably thought he was going to have an easy time explaining the company’s plans. Unfortunately, he completely bombed and made himself and Research In Motion look like they have no idea what they are talking about. If a company’s CEO can only spout incomprehensible gibberish about future plans, I’m sorry but abandon ship… Don’t worry, some of things he said did make some sense and I’ve got the really juicy details from D All Things Digital’s live blog of the event.

Gems of the Night from Mike Lazaridis:

Lazaridis claimed that the 7-inch screen size in the PlayBook tablet is “just the perfect size” but then after being asked if there are no plans at RIM for different sized models of the PlayBook, he shot back “we have plans for different sizes.”

When asked if the PlayBook OS will appear in BlackBerry smart phones, Lazaridis says, “We’ve wanted to do real mobile computing since we got into this. Have been constrained by tech limits, but … [sort of unclear what he’s saying here].”

Then Lazaridis gets cut off and accused of shipping old hardware in his BlackBerry lineup. Then he is asked when the QNX tablet OS will appear in BlackBerry smartphones since RIM wants it to be the company’s future. Lazaridis replies, “BlackBerry OS is about multicore products.” Erm. Right. That’s why Lazaridis also said last night that BlackBerrys won’t get the new OS until they transition to dual-core processors.

It goes on and on and on…

Take this gem from the Q&A session:

“Q: So I own a Torch, but it’s slow and has a low res screen. I’m confused, you’re creating a false dichotomy between the PlayBook and the smartphone. I don’t understand that. How can you deliver this phone without the best hardware available today? You seem to be looking to the tablet for that. But this is a tiny tablet. What is the strategy? Why are you demoting my phone?

Mike: First of all, the Torch was designed to be a launch vehicle for BB 6. That argument could be used in reverse. In a world where Half VGA was high performance, the world had moved on to 1GHz CPUs and higher res displays… when you see how quickly that phone moves around, just imagine the next generation…”

Maybe this is why RIM has been struggling recently. Peter Kafka, who live blogged the event, couldn’t even understand what Lazaridis was talking about half the time. Just Google search if you’re interested in what other nonsense RIM’s CEO spouted off about. I can’t even make sense of most of it.

PlayBook demo at the event by Mike Lazaridis:

As you can see, it looks like at least the PlayBook is looking good so far. Between RIM’s recent acquisitions of QNX and TAT (The Astonishing Tribe), someone is going to make the PlayBook a solid tablet experience.